Fred Seibert's Blog

Steve Tompkins in his Nickelodeon writing office, with The Gashlycrumb Tinies poster

If this gets too complicated, I’m sorry about that…

Last week I was walking by the office of one of Fanboy & Chum Chum’s executive producers, Steve Tomkins*. I noticed his cool poster of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which he was obviously very proud of and it got me to telling him of my unusual, casual run in with Gorey’s work back in the day.

My soft spot for Gorey comes from a particular circumstance. In 1976, I was working with the composers and musicians Michael Mantler (who I posted about last month) and Carla Bley, when Mike released his LP which used Gorey’s writings as the libretto for his compositions called “The Hapless Child and Other Inscrutable Stories.”

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Culture Music music poetry

I’d never heard of Gorey (his Amphigorey hadn’t quite crashed into the mainstream), and Mike had always had a taste for interesting authors he liked to compose to (like Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett.  And Mike’s always unique casting had me quadruply intriqued (Robert Wyatt for the prog-rockers, Mike (on trumpet), Carla, Steve Swallow, & Jack DeJohnette for the jazzbos, and Terje Rypdal all of them). Check out a track, and pick up some MP3s.Michael Mantler > The Sinking Spell

So, while it’s always fun saying hi to Steve*, I got an extra cultural dose of nostalgic inspiration the other day. Thanks bud.

* By the way, in addition to doing a hilarious job on Fanboy & Chum Chum,  I found out about another unsung showbiz story. Who knew that Steve Tompkins created Ari Gold on Entourage?

As I was writing about my early experiences in the 1970s New York jazz scene yesterday, our friend Andy Schwartz was emailing me about his pieces about one of the great city music clubs, Tin Palace. Check them out in the online music mag Perfect Sound Forever.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with animation.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

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Mosaic Records Brochure No. 4

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Catalogs Consumer catalog 1984

In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. In the early 80s he and BlueNote executive Charlie Lourie started the pioneering Mosaic Records as the first company specializing in boxed set reissues of classic performances, available only by mail order. Michael and I became reacquainted when I ordered their first set (The Complete BlueNote Recordings of Thelonious Monk) and he asked me to get involved with helping them out of the hole. It turned out their ’sure thing’ idea wasn’t having many takers and they were worried about shutting down. My partner Alan Goodman and I turned them down two years in a row with a lot of unsolitcited advice about what they could do better –we were broke and our company was barely alive itself– even if we were talking through our hats. Everything we knew about direct mail cataloging was from being mail order customers ourselves and from a direct mail how-to book I’d read the first chapter of. We loved Michael and Charlie, and we admired what they were trying to accomplish at Mosaic, but we were just too low on bandwidth.

Three years in our company was doing a little better and Mosaic was doing a lot worse; Michael and Charlie successfully prevailed on us to finally help. We knew no more, but full of the arrogance of youth we lugged out Alan’s first generation portable computer and invented the first Mosaic 12-page brochure on our summer picnic table. Alan wrote every word (I supervised “strategy” — what else is new?), our friends Tom Corey and Scott Nash designed the thing, Jessica Wolf supervised the production and we mailed out the first Mosaic catalog ever in the summer of 1986.

We waited for the order phones to ring, and lo and behold, in the first three weeks Mosaic’s business had increased 10 fold. They were in business forever. Alan’s still writing the brochures, I’m still getting the free box sets and lobbing in ideas from the side. What a world we live in. I’ve never been prouder of any project I’ve worked on in my life.

Do you like jazz? Order one of the Mosaic sets. They are still the standard by which all others are judged.